R.I. candidate regrets anti-gay columns

U.S. Senate candidate Stephen Laffey said he regrets that he wrote columns denigrating gays when he was a college student.

Laffey, the mayor of Cranston, acknowledged writing the columns in a
story published Saturday in the Providence Journal. The paper reported
that it received copies of the columns anonymously in the mail earlier
in the week.

Laffey, 44, running a closely watched race against moderate
Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee (news, bio, voting record), said whoever
sent the articles wanted to smear him before the Sept. 12 primary. He
called the writings "sophomoric political satire" and said they do not
represent his views.

"Do I regret some of these things? Sure," he said. "But at the time, we were just having fun. We thought it was funny."

The Republican candidate wrote them in 1983 and 1984 while studying
at Bowdoin College in Maine. The articles appeared in a paper published
by campus Republicans.

In one column, Laffey said he has never seen a happy homosexual.

"This is not to say there aren't any; I simply haven't seen one in
my lifetime. Maybe they are all in the closet," he wrote. "All the
homosexuals I've seen are sickly and decrepit, their eyes devoid of
life."

In another column he wrote that pop music was turning the children
of America into sissies, and criticized the singer Boy George,
referring to him as "it."

"It wears girl's clothes and puts on makeup," he wrote. "When I hear
it sing, 'Do you really want to hurt me, do you really want to make me
cry,' I say to myself, YES, I want to punch your lights out, pal, and
break your ribs."

Polls have shown Laffey and Chafee running neck-and-neck in a race that has gained national attention.

The winner of the Republican primary will likely face Democratic
former Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse in the November election.

This is a hard one. Even I was pretty anti-gay during college and said similar things as he said above. I was even a college Republican. God help me, I was young (lol) :-) I worry we expect our candidates to have been perfect all along (even in their youth) when it seems sometimes the best people are the ones who have made many mistakes and learned the hard way what the right attitudes and choices are.